LONG BEACH — When the cavernous Aquarium of the Pacific goes dark, Bill Maloney follows his flashlight beam to the best part of his night shift.
In a navy jumpsuit and salt-glazed work boots, he splashes through his rounds, measuring ozone and hypochlorite in 1 million gallons of salt water, mostly piped in from four miles offshore. He cleans water cleaners. He monitors monitors.
At one point, he is paged by the aquarium's sophisticated computer.
"Woo-woo! Excitement," he says, squinting to read his beeper, which has interrupted his test of chlorine in the sea otters' pool. "We have a temperature alarm to check out. Must be predators. . . . The computer is smart enough to know how serious it is."
Maloney is one of seven life-support technicians at Southern California's newest aquarium. It's his job to get pestered by a computer, if that's what it takes to get 10,000 sea creatures through the night.
But his work is not all work. A marine biology graduate, Maloney, at 26, has hit the employment lotto.
While the rest of the city sleeps, he walks through the empty aquarium, his face flushed like that of a delighted 10-year-old. He fakes out the diving puffin birds by pretending to drop his keys. He pets a ray. He peers into the swell shark tank and spots a baby snout peeking out from behind a barnacle.
"Look--we got a new little one! This is so cool! This is the joy of being here." His grin is of a sort not often observed during graveyard shifts.
And this is before he's raced the seal.
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As long ago as 2500 BC, the Sumerian people of southern Mesopotamia maintained fish in ponds for food. In the 1st century, the Romans turned fish into pets. The world's first public aquarium opened in London in 1853. America got its first one three years later, in New York, sponsored by P.T. Barnum, the circus showman.
These aquariums were short-lived--as were the fish, who died for lack of proper maintenance. It was not enough just to fill a tank with water and dump creatures into it. Maintaining the habitat, from water temperature and surge to chemical balance, was and remains essential. It took about two decades for large-scale aquariums to keep sea life alive in captivity.
The nonprofit Aquarium of the Pacific is the fourth-largest public aquarium in the country these days, and even with about three football fields' worth of exhibition space, it's often crowded. More than 1.6 million visitors have streamed in and out since the facility opened a little less than a year ago.
